Could I get a link to that blog of yours?
84 karma · joined January 9, 2012
We also have 1.67% IE6 users who haven't take the hint, my banner and the fact it's totally broken doesn't deter them.
This is a public facing website, although we did investigate the IE7 users and found alot come from public/government networks. They strangely browse the site at work then buy at home (IE8+/Firefox/Chrome) which is frustrating as they won't buy if the site doesn't work in IE7...
Whilst on a university placement doing some web coding and databases work, the guy in the office next to me was having real problems with his website.
Being curious, I asked for the URL and took a look. A classic ASP and Access database powered website that was probably held together by bubblegum. He had outsourced the work to a Chinese company because they were cheaper than UK based companies (important point for later). The site was full of every web security hole known. Mainly lots and lots of SQL injection holes. He asked if I could fix the pile of garbage and I honestly couldn't, I don't like rewriting but when its an old (this was 3 years ago) tech with no English comments and their code quality zero, copy pasting everything.
So in the evenings and weekends for a month I rewrote it to ASP.NET MVC (1.0, latest at the time) and SQL Server. I got him to select a template off Themeforest for $15 that I reworked slightly (and badly, I'm not a designer).
He is happy, I am happy with £500 for my work. I finish my placement and go back to university but came back to my placement for another year to do a startup idea. He had moved offices and we have very little contact.
After finishing university and 2 years later, I join a "Soul Destroying Corp" (not the one you are thinking of) and decide that isn't what I want to do with my life, so I setup my business and tell him that I'm now doing my own thing and looking for clients.
Turns out my weekend/evening £500 website generated him around £500,000+ in revenue (not profit) and his business grew from just him to 5 people. All his sales leads came through the website.
From September last year till now, I have rewritten it and we are automating more of his "manual" (lots of Word, Excel and paper) to be totally automated or a few mouse clicks.
Wow, when I think back, that website was terrible but it worked well for 2 years and grew his business. Huge ROI for him but now he is paying me back by hiring me to rewrite/automate more of his business.
Found some good guys to do work with now on a kind of "per project" approach which is good.
Interested to read the book as I found my weaknesses to be:
1. Charging for my work. I still find I undercharge as I enjoy the work and feel awkward asking for large amounts per billable hour. I'm now kind of trapped on low billable hours with my initial clients...
2. Finances. I've learnt enough and in the UK you can survive for the first 6 months without an accountant. I'm probably going to get one soon to handle the more complex tax/pay stuff.
3. Work out a proper hourly rate. Don't use the same broken formula I did thinking I can work 7 billable hours per day. I end up with about 4.5. I didn't account for the gaps between work. I now understand why freelancers have high rates.
I've already had to explain to my parents that cookies aren't evil, the sites they visit (BBC/Google etc) are mainstream and fine.
As an EU resident and webmaster of several sites for myself and clients. I see little benefit to my visitors other than causing me a lot of grief over trying to follow guidelines and hoping my implementation doesn't break them.
I was speaking to a client about it today, he hasn't seen anything about it and I doubt many small business owners have seen (or cared) much about it.
Perhaps its down to the job market in the UK and .NET that everything is handled by recruiters that hide lots of details about BigCo jobs or make them sound dull.
http://visitbristol.co.uk/things-to-do
Particularly page:
http://visitbristol.co.uk/things-to-do/attractions
Has the things like the zoo, aquarium, ss great britian and so on.
My current client is going to talk to me about the idea Monday. He has alot of knowledge and could help verify the idea. I suspect he will tell me all his horror stories of other companies trying this previously.
1. Location. In Bristol, United Kingdom. Not London.
2. The .NET scene isn't very startup focused. Of all the .NET usergroup events I've attended (in Bristol) over the years I've only seen 1 person talking about their startup needing developers.
3. I scare other .NET (501) people with all these new hipster technologies like NoSQL (RavenDB, Redis) or cloud servers.
Can't find a business co-founder, I'm a guy that likes building stuff but has no ideas.
Part of my problem as well is that I use different tools to rails, mainly ASP.NET MVC etc.
You mention "The project is music related, Ruby on Rails + significant Javascript" but if you already have started coding why are you looking to hire a developer?
I've read alot around the subject of business focused co-founders seeking technical co-founders (mainly so I could know where to "be found") and are you offering just a salary or low salary + shares?
Would you think this book and screencasts would work for my skill level or should I use another book to learn more about Ruby?
Looking for projects (long-term or short term) to fill gaps in my availability.
I do high quality work with ASP.NET MVC. My skills include: PSD to HTML(5)/CSS(3), SQL Server, jQuery, RavenDB and most common things in-between. I'm a fan of using cloud hosting (AppHarbor), TDD and clean (and simple) code.
I'm able to manage all (technical, not design) aspects of web apps and sites.
Contact: email in profile Company: http://www.orangelightning.co.uk
It does PageSpeed + YSlow + other stuff. Saves me having to run both tools in my browser and it combines all the output into a nice interface with the ability to send my client a PDF to talk about small tweaks we could make.
Artist: The Glitch Mob
Daft Punk: Tron Sound Track, Tron legacy reconfigured
Particularly with music from The Glitch Mob I find my focus is more intense and I only break my current activity when the music finishes. Need to find more music that gets my mind in the zone like that...
Heroku doesn't charge for custom domains, but I would prefer AppHarbor went PHPFog's way of only allowing 3 free apps and charge $5 for those to have custom domains.
I've written three blog posts on the whole AppHarbor pricing change and just believe they are missing a whole subset of the market. In my final blog post on their new pricing I suggested someone could potentially fill this void by providing a subset of AppHarbor features as a kind of "baby" AppHarbor that is designed for small hobby/MVP projects that don't need features like multiple workers, load balancing rather just a better experience (git push) over shared hosting (ftp).
Combining RavenDB with AppHarbor will be a great development story. Even though AppHarbor's new pricing (IMO) does put off small projects and MVP projects, I still plan to migrate one of my bigger clients to AppHarbor and (hosted) RavenDB as running a VPS is a drag. Just need to get up the motivation to write some code to store PDF files onto S3 rather than the filesystem.
With AppHarbor's pricing announcements yesterday (which sucked) I've finally got around to looking at Mono and Heroku. It looks a good combination, although still referred to as unsupported/unstable. I plan to deploy a few test apps to Heroku using the mono build pack and NancyFX.
The first is my company website which admittedly doesn't get a whole load of traffic and survives completely on their free instance, free 20mb database and a custom domain name.
The second is a client's website with 2 instances, a 10GB database and several other addons.
With my first, I feel the new pricing puts me off, the site is low traffic and doesn't need a lot of resources to run. I could pay the new $10 per month for a custom domain name or I could just stick the site on a cheap shared hosting package, I use a provider that charges me $65 per year for 20+ domain names on it. Although I do get easier deployment, building etc with AppHarbor its not a compelling story as I don't change my company site that much to justify it.
With my second website, I found it much easier as the client want to move fast and AppHarbor's build and seamless deploy really helped as the client could refresh the page and see the changes. AppHarbor really works well with this client and he has come to appreciate that although it is more expensive than say shared or VPS that the uptime is better and it costs him less money as I don't bother charging for 2 minute changes that I can do quickly and push to AppHarbor.
Overall, I have mixed feelings about these pricing changes, especially as I started looking at what Heroku is offering. I plan to play around over the weekend with NancyFX, Mono and Heroku. Perhaps that combination would work well with my smaller clients.
Looking for freelance/remote/onsite Bristol area.
I'm a web developer guy, doing ASP.NET MVC (Not WebForms), C#, SQL Server and RavenDB. I'm good with the full web stack. I can also turn PSD designs into beautiful HTML/CSS/jQuery functioning websites. I'm a fan of clean, simple code and not the traditional N+1 layers of abstractions people associate with .NET developers.
I had many late nights trying to debug similar problems. One particular problem I never solved was using the language/location information to help filter out invalid tweets in non English tweets.
I used C# to do the processing and eventually gave up trying to cast the JSON from their API to static types and used C#'s dynamic keyword as their documentation was so poorly written and didn't include decent examples.
Fond memories.